TV in Color - Core Post, Dan Lark

This week’s reading explored how television articulates race in the context of American society. Christine Acham’s article focused on how The Cosby Show’s fantasy of a post-racial America belied how the show actually works to mediate notions of race. The show enacted a conservative fantasy of black social life where a hard working and “respectable” black family could appeal to white peoples’ insistence that race was no longer a determining factor in American society. Similarly, Jennifer Esposito argues that Ugly Betty also mediates a post-racial vision of American that does not reflect the reality of many Latinx people's’ everyday experience, reminding us that a post-racial/colorblind society is a fantasy that propagates and obfuscates real racism. Finally, Herman Gray’s article shifts its focus to the industrial conditions of television production, arguing that black popular culture was central to attracting new viewers. Niche “narrowcasting” became increasingly important for managing an increasingly competitive media environment. Black audiences then were a low-risk investment in capital’s search for new audiences.

What ties these articles together is their assertion that popular culture “representations do not just reflect already determined meanings. Instead, they help contribute to discursive understandings” (Esposito 524). While Gray is critical of a sole focus on discursivity, he insists that television must “negotiate and renego­tiate, package and repackage, circulate and recirculate. . .common sense” understandings in order to “produce identifications and pleasures” (Gray 58). The representational, the economic, the social, and the political are bound up in each other, co-constituting the “racial formations” (to use Esposito's term borrowed from Omi and Winant) that television is quite good at reifying, making them seem natural and inevitable as opposed to constructed and (unevenly) distributed. An explicit example of this can be found in Acham’s article, where she shows how conservatives took up The Cosby Show as a potential substitute for social welfare programs (Acham 108).

All three scholars seem skeptical of the power of representation that animated much of the popular culture scholarship of figures like Stuart Hall. This makes sense in the context of American society, where the commodification of black culture and bodies has been central to the articulation and management of difference since the nation’s founding. This leaves me with a few questions: Is it possible to recover representation in such a way that it doesn’t serve to reify race or that is separate from capital’s push for diverse products? Can narrowcasting be seen as the dominant mode of audience construction today, where the drive is to “define. . .audiences ever more precisely” (Gray 58)? If so, then what does that mean for our identifications and pleasures? Finally, are there other examples that might challenge the logic of representation? Here, I think of the tension between facial recognition technologies poor ability to recognize black faces and the fact that defense and police departments are on the forefront of improving this technology to serve practices of predictive policing.